An American study has just shown that our brain is able to identify sounds and tones specific to a language heard and learned in early childhood but then forgotten.
With time, goes, everything goes, except perhaps the memories of a language. Indeed, according to Canadian research published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the brain continues to respond to sounds and tones of a language heard and learned in early childhood but then forgotten.
A study conducted on adopted children
To reach this conclusion, these scientists conducted their experiment on Chinese children adopted by French-speaking Canadian families. They therefore focused on 48 girls aged 9 to 17 who were exposed very young to different levels of French and Chinese.
They played to three sub-groups recordings of different tones very characteristic of Chinese that do not exist in French. The first sub-group was made up of young girls born and raised in French-speaking families who had not learned another language. The second included only girls adopted before the age of three by families who spoke only French and then no longer heard or spoken Chinese. The third sub-group was made up of bilingual girls adopted in China, having learned French before the age of three and having continued to practice Chinese.
Areas of the brain that are active long after
And the results reported by this medical team are final. MRI scans performed while playing these sounds showed that all girls who were exposed to Chinese at a very young age – whether or not they continued to speak that language afterwards – had an active brain region that was not there. was not in subjects only exposed to French. “The mental representations created in the brain of a very young child by learning a language can persist into adulthood despite the loss of the ability to speak it”, explained to AFP, the main Study author Lara Pierce, a psychologist from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Higher levels in grammar and reading
“In the domain of language, the first year of life seems to be an optimal period for the development of the categories of sounds of the mother tongue, achieved through a process of harmonization with the environment,” she underlines.
According to Lara Pierce, “the phonological categories that form during this period reinforce the learning of the mother tongue and provide the foundations necessary to acquire higher levels of knowledge of language such as grammar and reading. “
“While research helps to understand the formation of these early representations in the brain, the brain mechanisms necessary to maintain them remain largely misunderstood. This research is the first neural observation of what happens in the brain during the first moments of learning and the persistence of effects, ”she concludes.
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